“In some countries, x rays are used to make x-ray images.”
Read that sentence again. Notice anything peculiar about it? Why is the common term for ionizing radiation spelled differently? The only grammatical difference is that one usage is nominal and the other adjectival. But why the noun without a hyphen and the adjective with one?
That is a question I have been posing for four decades without ever getting a reasonable answer. Many words are used as different parts of speech, nouns, adjectives, even verbs. with no change in spelling.
One of my first chores when I joined the American College of Radiology staff in 1961 was to edit its monthly newsletter. I found no style sheet of standard usage and so decided to make one, borrowing generally from that of the Associated Press news service. I looked at the two journals. On the issue of the hyphen, they were uniform in their inconsistency. Noun, no, adjective, yes. I asked my boss, Bill Stronach, about this. He had never noticed. When the term appeared in his letters, it was spelled however the typist chose to do it. When I suggested a need for consistency, at least in publications, he delegated the task to me with no recommendation. When I convened the ACR public relations commission, I posed the hyphen question. None of them had ever noticed. They suggested that I write the editors of the two journals. I looked in several dictionaries. No total consistency.
So I wrote the two editors. I explained that I was new and confused and asked the why of the hyphen. Back came very nice responses. Welcome to radiology. I was sure to make the ACR Bulletin better. As to the hyphen, that’s the way it always has been—and, by inference—the way it will always be.
There was also the question of whether the word was singular or plural. As an adjective, it seldom was plural. As a noun, I found both. By now, I had acquired just enough physics to understand that in no way was a single photon generated. Was it a common noun, taking a capital only if it began a sentence? Or was it a proper noun, as the synonym for “Roentgen ray”? Delving further, was the name capitalized when it referred to a unit of radiation in air? But then, I did not have to venture down those paths very far in the ACR Bulletin.
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